The Marine Corps Way: Using Maneuver Warfare to Lead a Winning Organization

Emulating the techniques that the Marines employ to promote rapid tempo can enable you to move at the speed of decision and preempt competitors in the business environment.

Training Decision-Making Speed

From the day they enter the Corps, Marines relentlessly strive to increase decision-making speed. One of the greatest challenges for enlisted recruits and officer candidates in initial training is having too much to do and not enough time to do it. By design, overly ambitious daily routines artificially introduce stress into the training environment, but more important, they inculcate a constant sense of urgency, which is intended to stay with Marines throughout their careers.

At The Basic School, newly minted lieutenants participate in hypothetical combat exercises on sand table dioramas with unrealistically short time limits. In front of their peers and competing against an instructor, lieutenants must formulate the best possible plan in the time period allotted. With repetition under increasingly challenging conditions, the lieutenants become more accustomed to the demands of decision making under pressure, and they begin to understand that, more often than not, unforgiving real world situations do not afford sufficient time to formulate complete plans.

In another time-sensitive exercise, lieutenants receive descriptive reports via radio from a notional sniper observing notional battlefield events forward of friendly lines. The lieutenant must determine how much information is enough and when to act. In the exercise the sniper acts as a scout until he is ordered to fire. The sniper s reports continue until the lieutenant keys his handset ”the signal to fire ”at which point the lieutenant must formulate a tactical plan for his or her unit based on the information received. Lieutenants, who key the handset early in the report, risk insufficient information for the formulation of their plans but are usually rewarded for acting quickly. Those who wait too long to key the handset might develop a better plan but are penalized severely for hesitation by instructors. The personal balance taught by this exercise reinforces the notion that decision should occur sooner rather than later.

The OO in OODA

Knowing that proximity to unfolding events minimizes the time required to o bserve and o rient, Marine commanders strive to locate themselves as close to the action as possible. As mentioned in Chapter 4, they always lead from the front. And when they reach the point at which their proximity to unfolding events begins to impede their ability to see the big picture, they delegate ample decision-making authority to their subordinate leaders who are closest to the action.

¹ / ₃ “ ² / ₃ Rule

The ¹ / ₃ - ² / ₃ Rule requires that the leader allocate only one-third of the time available before a deadline for his or her own planning and reserve the remaining two- thirds for his or her subordinates , so that they may plan and coordinate at their respective levels. Marines strict adherence to this rule reveals that they discipline themselves not to monopolize precious time during the planning process, thereby minimizing the incidence of decision-making bottlenecks.

Obligation to Dissent, Part 2

In Chapters 5 and 8, we saw that the Marines encourage the obligation to dissent during the decision-making process to foster boldness and decentralized decision making. But they also realize that this practice can inhibit tempo past a certain point. Accordingly, once the decision has been made, Marines execute that decision as if it were their own. Such discipline enables the Marines to leverage the insights of junior Marines and encourage buy-in during planning while avoiding the potential paralysis that can result from consensus-based decision making during implementation.

R2P2

Two-thousand-member Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) have institutionalized the Rapid Reaction Planning Process (R2P2), which enables a task force to launch from the ships that carry them and respond to calls for combat, evacuation, humanitarian assistance, or disaster relief ashore within six hours. R2P2 compresses the normal Marine Corps planning process into six steps: mission analysis, course of action (COA) development, COA war gaming, COA comparison and decision, orders development, and transition to execution ”an impressive feat given the size of the MEU and number of constituencies involved.

Within the first hour the MEU commander and his battle staff receive the mission, gather available intelligence, and provide initial planning guidance. Within an hour and a half the battle staff evaluates possible courses of action, conducts war games , and recommends a preferred COA to the commander, who makes a final decision. Within three hours the battle staff refines its intelligence preparation and prepares a full written operations order. Within four hours the MEU commander and the battle staff brief the operations order. And in the remaining two hours before launch, ground combat, air, and support units conduct briefs, final preparations , and rehearsals. ^[11]

To meet the demanding time requirements of R2P2, the MEU commander and his battle staff rely heavily on exhaustive practice, continuity in working relationships, and, above all, standardized operating procedures (SOPs), which allow units to carry out familiar tasks effectively and efficiently with minimal or no higher-level guidance or communications. ^[12]

Network Operations and Systems Security

The Marine Corps, like most organizations today, relies heavily on information systems to accelerate the pace at which it operates. But an increased reliance on technology creates new vulnerabilities: a downed server, virus, hacker, or major system failure could cause the Corps s high tempo of operations to grind to a halt.

To mitigate systems vulnerabilities, the Marines build a great deal of redundancy and security into their data systems. Every network path has at least three routes, sometimes many more. Redundancy, which entails building and placing more systems online, is inherently expensive, but systems failure is more costly in the long run. Additionally, Marines build a layered defense to protect against security breaches and virus attacks. They install high-tech security hardware and software at all entry points and inside the network, closely monitor systems for intrusion, and work vigilantly to secure all outgoing data.

^[11] Not quite the 1/3-2/3 rule, but even the Marines aren t perfect.

^[12] United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Planning Process , MCWP 5-1 with Change 1, J-16 2001.